I love this.
Apple prides itself on it's environmentally friendly facade yet it's workers clog up the roads around the campus moving 2-5 mph shooting exhaust in the air.
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Apple's Corporate Employees Returning to Offices on Hybrid Schedule Starting Today
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Apple prides itself on it's environmentally friendly facade yet it's workers clog up the roads around the campus moving 2-5 mph shooting exhaust in the air.
You remind me a lot of someone at work, he often says s** like that. He comes in early and leaves late, is super organised and goes always by the book, he even takes his break exactly at the designated time. People avoid him. When his evaluation came in he almost cried for having the poorest performance in the team. 3rd time in a row.
Suffice to say I am not entirely sold on the merits of working from home. I acknowledge the benefits like not having to commute (which saves time), but these people agreed to work for Apple knowing that they would need to drive to and from work every day (ie: it’s a package deal). Staying at home during the pandemic was nice while it lasted, but you had to know that it was always more about managing a dangerous situation, and less about revolutionising the manner in which people worked.
At the same time, I believe Apple management is anxious to have its employees return to the office because Apple is predicated on having the various departments (especially hardware and software) cooperating with each other. Working from home might work for a software company that makes an app which runs on every platform. Not so much for a company where your software is supposed to integrate with your hardware on a system level (eg: AirPods integrating with Apple Music, or even the recent Universal Control which was delayed for half a year).
I think Tim Cook knows that the longer their employees stay away from the office, the more product development will suffer. Hybrid work arrangements is already a huge concession on their end, IMO.
Two things here. The first is that it wasn't nice staying at home. It was disruptive. They had to rebalance work/home lives. People had to turn a portion of their fairly small home into an office, sometimes two or three offices. These home offices often included significant additional and unexpected costs that were not directly covered by the employer. Nor have I seen employers offering to "buy back" the home offices that people had to build to work from home.
Second, just because the intention was to manage a dangerous situation doesn't mean it can't be used as a catalyst for revolutionizing the way people work. Instead of factory workers being locked in a burning building we saw people locked in their homes. Allowing the opportunity to pass without seeking revolution/compensation would be disrespectful to both our ancestors who had to work in truly deadly conditions and our grandchildren who could have better work conditions as a result of our response now.
Given the historical secrecy that Apple has had, and the fact that their teams are fairly small, WFH doesn't seem difficult to manage at all. They did a great job the past two years. Wanting something isn't good enough of a justification to get it. Apple could have saved face here by saying they were opening the office back up, and allowing employees to come in and use the resources if it helps them. Some employees might return six days a week, others never, and many in between. The issue isn't that the office is open - the issue is they are trying to force employees through the door instead of holding them open.
From a consumer perspective, Apple products didn't suffer the past two years. And we don't know if Tim thinks development suffered. I agree that employees provided a huge concession to Apple by agreeing to work from home, but forcing them to return, even part-time isn't respecting the employees. If they made it optional and allowed the employee and not their manager to decide, that would have been fine. Telling an employee they have to return just so they can "all be in the building" completely disrespects the sacrifices made by your employees.
The office should be treated like a break room or a corporate gym. It's an amenity provided by the company but there is no expectation that every employee will use it.
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I doubt this is going to work, for one simple reason - human nature.
Even if returning to the office might help me in my work, the thought of having to spend an hour driving there may be enough of a turn-off that I end up not using the option even if it may be advantageous to my work, because of other personal motivations wholly unrelated with work. It also sets a bad precedent where your normally hardworking employees see that their colleagues don't need to come in to work and are getting away with it and start to do the same thing as well.
I believe that Apple still just wants to make the best products possible (going by their own interpretation of what that entails). If getting employees back in the office is what is required, then that is what Apple has to do, and it cannot be a choice. Draw this line in the sand, and if employees are unhappy or unable to accept this, then they have the choice to seek employment elsewhere as well.
I simply cannot agree with the analogy that the use of office space should somehow be deemed as "optional" as using the company gym.
You assume hardworking equals going to the office. There is no evidence that I have seen that those two groups are the same. We already know some people are more productive at home because they can work undisrupted. Most jobs that can do WFH pay for productivity not hours, even if they are technically paid by the hour. If an employee does an excellent job in 30 hours, they should be rewarded for their work, not punished for not working 10 more hours. Alternatively, it shouldn't matter to the employer if they are working at 100% efficiency but rather do they get the job done at the level expected in the time required. How they accomplish that should not be relevant because most WFH-capable positions rent their expertise to their employer, not their time.
Unfortunately for precedent, Apple is large enough that this sort of behavior won't cause them to fail. Companies that look to them for guidance and try to replicate this might. More to the point - this shouldn't be about what Apple or any company wants. At this point, they should be bending over backward to reward the employees for sticking with them. Employees could have jumped ship during the pandemic when turnover was high and employees were nearly impossible to find. Forcing an anti-employee policy immediately after they demonstrated loyalty is a great way to foster a toxic environment. The employees who don't quit will be worse for the company than losing the ones that left. Because while they might come to the office, they will bring a disease that lingers longer than covid. Historically the best employees get offers first, and they are the ones who will leave before they even return to the office, or they will leave shortly after as the realization that they are not respected is forced on them 60% of the week. The ones that feel stuck, the ones just good enough to get in but not good enough to get out, will spread the toxic culture.
It's not an analogy. The past two years proved that the office isn't necessary for many to perform one's job. It is an optional resource that some, but not all, may find attractive to use as they see fit. The office has become an amenity.
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I want to second this notion.
If I could work remotely and it wasn't a pandemic, maybe it would be nice. But I wasn't working remotely - I couldn't go to a cafe or bookstore or public space or co-working space. I couldn't go out to eat with friends, family or neighbors.
I was stuck at home.
While it was nice that I didn't have to commute, I couldn't use my 27" iMac, I had to use a macbook pro. I didn't have a home office and had to share the dining table.
People realized that despite how sucky the pandemic was - the part that worked was not commuting.
Maybe in the future if people can work from home they can also socialize during the day, like lunch and breaks, but we didn't get that "fun" during the pandemic.
I also agree about the office. I absolutely spend more time at the office chatting than working. Maybe you walk to someone's desk to ask a question, but you also spend some time asking about their weekend, family etc.
Not really.
I am not saying that people can't be hardworking at home (god knows I busted my ass off preparing online teaching material when my school pivoted to home based learning during HBL). But simply working hard doesn't necessarily equate to being effective in the work you do.
Productivity here also seems to be equated with simply checking tasks off a to-do list (eg: my job is to churn out a thousand lines of code a day). Which I imagine is fine if you work in a silo while requiring zero input from others. However, I do feel that when it comes to a company like Apple, whose products are predicated on hardware, software and services working together, you still need everyone in the same room talking to one another and keeping each other in the loop.
Take my job as a teacher, for example. There are tasks where I am better off doing at home, like grading papers or preparing teaching material, since these tasks just involve I, me and myself, and I prefer performing them with minimal interruptions.
Then there are tasks like handling students, meeting parents, planning events, vetting exam papers, that do require multiple parties to meet together to trash things out. Maybe I am doing it wrong, but (especially) during the pandemic, I didn't really feel that my zoom meetings were particularly effective. I hated back and forth WhatsApp and email threads that didn't seem to go anywhere, and ended up calling people to thrash things out and have a decision made. I find that zoom is handy for one-way transmission of information (eg: I talk, you listen), but anything that requires more than 2 people, I still ended up going back to school and meeting my team members, and I felt the 3 hours spent in person was more effective than an entire day of zoom.
You will probably say that yeah, it's a choice, but when my choice involves and impacts other people, then it's not really a choice. What happens when one party is more comfortable meeting in person while the other would rather have the meeting online simply because he doesn't want to commute to work? Who gives in? And this is where management has to come in to play the baddie, and make a decision that will allow for the best work to be done, even if it will be unpopular, because that's what has to be done.
It's not about respect, really. Work is work, and work at Apple involves people coming together to talk (something which I still feel is better done in person). I am not saying that working from home as a concept doesn't or cannot work, but I do feel that Apple as a company is in general not designed to thrive under such a working paradigm, because of the way its design-led culture works (product designers decide on the desired experience, and the various teams then work backwards to see how to best replicate this experience using existing tech).
I don't know what Apple could have said differently to better manage this, but I am in agreement with Tim Cook that Apple employees need to start reporting back to the office. And the sooner the better.
I think it's the other way around. But it depends on whether one is referring to Apple or a smaller company. Employees should be grateful to companies for not laying them off and helping them get through the pandemic in various ways. Granted a happy employee is the prerequisite to a productive, team player, but this works both ways. Employees should evaluate what it wants out of their employer and the employer should evaluate what it wants from their employees. Where that happy medium doesn't exist, generally the employee loses.
If we are discussing Apple, I don't think it matters. If we are discussing other companies, it depends on whether it's easy enough to find another job.
Employees are replaceable, companies will continue on...especially large companies. An employee that creates a toxic environment will soon be looking for employment elsewhere.
Nah, sometimes it's better when problem employees leave a company.
Rather than just some conjecture, I'd like to find out if any of the above scenarios caused some extraordinary shift in a companies moral, products, quality, revenue etc. The scenario seems to be top employees leave company, company flounders. When in reality I think when employees leave, it's a opportunity for the company to better the position. There's a pot for every cover as the saying goes.
I agree with this. But we seem to have a disconnect between upper management, middle management, and employees.
Everything I know about Apple, which I admit is only based on reading about them, is that they are the largest startup. Products are made by the smallest group possible, and hardware-software integration involves very small teams. I am not claiming a company like Apple doesn't need to meet face-to-face, but I can't imagine that the need for meetings is predictable enough to force every employee to be on campus 60% of their time.
It sounds like you are confusing comfort with capability. You prefer to work a specific way, and because you are comfortable doing some tasks in person you are able to be more productive in person. I have no doubt that you are more efficient or effective in person for some tasks, but that doesn't mean you and the people you work with couldn't learn to be more effective remotely. It would be really hard to get everyone to change their behaviors to make remote tasks more efficient. It might even take longer than you plan to be in your career. But just because you might never be more productive remotely doesn't mean it won't push the community to a point where they are.
You are correct. First, my biggest issue with Cook's return to office policy is that it doesn't seem to account for people who don't need to go in. It might be a minority, but some employees won't have peer pressure to be at work, but the policy as detailed so far doesn't provide them the flexibility to work remotely.
Second, my hope is that their choice won't be made on short-term benefits. Windows vs Mac is a great example of this. Because Windows has historically been so concerned about supporting old hardware and software they really struggle to push forward. macOS (and iOS to a lesser extent) however is famous for killing off features that people still depend upon because they know the replacement isn't just better in the long run, supporting old approaches will slow down the adoption of the new solution.
I think Apple, of all companies, best understands the importance of shedding dated practices. You have provided a good argument for why some people need to occasionally be in person. They still sound like the exception, not the rule. Tim needs to open the office, but it should really be up to the teams to decide if and when they should come in.
How would Apple or any company make money during the pandemic if they laid off every employee? 100% of companies survived because employees were willing to adjust.
This is why we have worker reform.
I don't see how Apple is any different. They could have laid everyone off and not produced any products for two years. By not doing that they, along with every other company that stayed afloat, conceded some control over working conditions. It is detrimental to the progress of worker's rights to not fight this to the very end.
If the only people willing to work at a company are toxic employees then it's going to be difficult to replace them. If they fire someone only to replace them immediately they are going to have to prove that their toxic behavior was out of line with their company philosophy. Good luck proving to a jury of people who were forced back to work when they didn't want to, that the toxic environment wasn't fostered by the employer.
That's true when surgical removal of toxic employees frees other employees. But it won't do anything to merely remove the loudest employee. That will simply make the silent majority toxic too. I don't mean that to be political but it is going to hit the fan as soon as one 40+ minority mother is replaced by someone who is young, white, or male.
I think it's more subtle than we can see right now. I doubt you can measure it on any timescale smaller than a decade. I suspect it takes a while for employee morale to impact the bottom line. The snowballs being addressed today might seem insignificant, but inevitably they will become an avalanche, and at that point, it becomes hard to stop.
Consider Apple's history. Apple was huge when Steve left, but it didn't take long for Apple to begin to fall apart. Maybe it's just me, but when I hear the story being told it's always done from a leadership perspective. Sculley was bad and Steve was good. Maybe there are some truths in there, but Spindler and Amelio didn't pick bad products over good ones, they picked the best products from many bad ones. The employees were not driven to make the best they could and so the best wasn't available to ship. Tim can't replicate Jobs. He has to be his own person. I don't say that as a fault on Cook. I like Cook. I am saying that outside of Jobs, no one at Apple has demonstrated the ability to pull gems from suffering. So why risk it?
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It the employees didn't adjust, they would be fired. I'm sure there are companies whose revenue was affected, kept employees on. Employees should be grateful for having jobs.
Most states are at will employment. Unions excepted and contracts excepted, employees and employers are free to part ways as seen fit.
Apple seemed like it went to great lengths through the pandemic to keep employees satisfied. There are no workers rights (excepting labor laws etc). Workers don't have the right to perform their job as they want. They perform their job as the company wants.
I'd like an example, because the above doesn't represent the real world in corporate America, imo. I am not discussing startups, very small companies etc. It's impossible to generalize this type of thing.
Again, most states are at will. I do not believe companies in general, put up with employees that contribute more problems than solutions. Again, corporate America.
What snowballs? This is a strawman. Companies who have problems with their employees' performance will cut them loose.
Apple 2022 is not Apple at the start of decade. That comparison cannot be made.
Thankfully Tim can't replicate Jobs. Cook did the job he was supposed to do. I can't relate to "pulling gems from suffering". That's a strawman. While some may not like Apple, their success can be objectively measured. That's the only metric that counts. Every employee is replaceable; even Steve Jobs. Apple continued without him, and no one knows if Apple would have reaped the success that Tim Cook brought, if Jobs hadn't met with an unfortunate, untimely death.
You keep calling things strawman when you don't want to address them. It's frustrating to deal with.
But I get it, we disagree on treating people with respect. You seem to be suggesting that it is acceptable to extract value from others for the lowest possible price. That will serve you well in a world that doesn't see others as equal.
The law already says that workers have some rights. You can’t fire someone because they are pregnant, or in a wheelchair, or report abuse. Workers have rights. Work from home should be one of them. If a company can accommodate work from home they should be required to accommodate it, even if it is expensive.
Just because things are acceptable now doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying to change them. That's all I am promoting. Change. I can only hope that others that read this can see the difference between ideas and dismissals.
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It’s called a straw because you made up the personna of a hypothetical disgruntled employee and constructed a story around it. That doesn’t mean there aren’t disgruntled employees but discussing some documented case would be far more productive.
No, we disagree on whose the boss. People should always be treated with respect. But you work for an employee who lays down the parameters of the job. Employees should listen to constructive feedback from employees. Kow-towing to unreasonable demands from an employer perspective is another matter.
Did you miss the part where I mentioned federal employment law?
It’s not. It’s not a protected right and never likely to be so.
They should? I get it’s your opinion, but won’t happen.
True.
Change is inevitable. Look at the flexible hybrid approach from apple. Whoda ever would thunk it?
@4jasontv Just wondering - would you be okay with Apple (or any other company) slashing the salaries of employees who are allowed to work from home and don’t have to contend with the higher costs of living that come with living in the Bay Area?
So far, the discussion has always centred around the employees getting what they want with zero compromises, but there has been zero discussion of what they might be willing to give up in order to be allowed to work remotely.
I also doubt working from home will ever become a fundamental human right. The government, in the very least, has vested interest in propping up property prices and human traffic in business districts. Not to mention that not every company is structured to thrive under remote work arrangements.
My stance remains that the decision to offer WFH arrangements should ultimately still be left to the individual company, with employees being free to consider these perks when deciding whether to work for such a company or not.
I guess I am also a little indifferent to this because so far, the people I see pushing for WFH tend to be the higher wage earners. These are not rank and file employees like Amazon warehouse workers or Apple retail we are talking about, but high-income individuals earning 6 figures a year.
If they are making that much money, they can afford to commute (and I see the time spent as part of their generous remuneration). And I guess I am just having a little bit of a hard time empathising with people who are on one hand raking in big bucks, while on the other hand complaining about what I feel are fairly inconsequential matters at the end of the day.
Maybe I am on the wrong side of history on this matter, but right now, it really just seems to me like sheer entitlement.
So far, the discussion has always centred around the employees getting what they want with zero compromises, but there has been zero discussion of what they might be willing to give up in order to be allowed to work remotely.
I also doubt working from home will ever become a fundamental human right. The government, in the very least, has vested interest in propping up property prices and human traffic in business districts. Not to mention that not every company is structured to thrive under remote work arrangements.
My stance remains that the decision to offer WFH arrangements should ultimately still be left to the individual company, with employees being free to consider these perks when deciding whether to work for such a company or not.
I guess I am also a little indifferent to this because so far, the people I see pushing for WFH tend to be the higher wage earners. These are not rank and file employees like Amazon warehouse workers or Apple retail we are talking about, but high-income individuals earning 6 figures a year.
If they are making that much money, they can afford to commute (and I see the time spent as part of their generous remuneration). And I guess I am just having a little bit of a hard time empathising with people who are on one hand raking in big bucks, while on the other hand complaining about what I feel are fairly inconsequential matters at the end of the day.
Maybe I am on the wrong side of history on this matter, but right now, it really just seems to me like sheer entitlement.
The reason that I don't spend time talking about compromises is that the employees already compromised by working from home. I am not aware of any company that paid rent for all of these home offices.
Unless the employee was asked, how much more money would need to work from home, and then paid it unchallenged then there is nothing to discuss in terms of employees compromising anymore.
They already compromised. It's time they were paid what was due.
Millions of people took up rooms of their already small homes to dedicate to be a home office. They were able to restructure. They had two years, companies can restructure to support remote work arrangements.
Yes. Well, we don't give companies a choice when it comes to being ADA compliant or ensuring they have a safe work environment. This easily falls into the same category. If were able to operate remotely than the position can operate remotely.
What does salary have to do with it? Who gets to decide what a higher wage is? A doctor who makes a $300,000 a year salary doesn't necessarily take that all home and even if they do, they earned it. I fail to see a scenario where the amount someone makes is relevant.
Again. Irrelevant. It fails to account for the expenses they incurred to get to the position they are in.
Entitlement is invading people's homes with the threat that if they don't dedicate a portion of their residence to an office they will be fired. To me, it seems like hypocrisy to claim that the burden on employees was essential and unavoidable, but now that some of them have adjusted it is entitlement that they want to stay.
Any company that was able to make it work during the pandemic can make it work now.
In a discussion about employees and a company, there is only one person, and therefore only one party that needs to be respected. But now we are headed into a conversation asking if corporations are people, and I really don't want to go there.
Well, if it was such a burden for these employees to work from home, then they should have no issues with returning to the office.
They can, but I have yet to see a compelling argument why companies should. Everything I have read so far boils down to what is good for the employee (and very often, the reasons veer into personal reasons that have little to do with work itself).
I don't view working from home as being anywhere near in the same consideration as providing a safe and secure working environment. Unless you are telling me it's safer to work at home because the office is infested with pests or at danger of collapsing at any moment.
Not to mention that the ability to operate remotely is also in itself a very vague term. If an employee is able to to work at home with say, a 5% dip in productivity (not to mention the inconvenience caused by him not being on site if and when other people want to look for him), is that an acceptable compromise for the company to make? Or say he may actually be more productive, but his absence causes problems for other departments. Who decides what the maximum tradeoff will be? And why should one party have to bend over for the other?
It strikes me as "rich man's problem". Like if you are earning minimum wage and complain about having to spend a significant chunk of that money travelling to and from work, I agree that remote work (or at least, finding employment closer to your house) would be a huge improvement in terms of your standard of living. Because usually, lower-income workers lack the resources to obtain the infrastructure needed to make WFH conducive, and they are usually not holding jobs that would allow for working remotely in the first place.
I will say that if one's reason for desiring remote work includes being able to get an extra hour of sleep a day, or not having to commute for meetings or being able to get send your laundry for dry-cleaning during work hours, I view it more as a perk which every employee absolutely has a right to negotiate for when applying for a job, but it's far from being an obligation which a company is expected to have to deliver.
At the end of the day, both parties have to play their part. The employee wants a job with terms that he finds agreeable, and the employer also wants an employee who is able to work on the company's terms. And if either party is unhappy, there is really no shame in the employee walking away, or the employer wishing him all the best in his future endeavours, and opting to hire someone else who has no qualms about commuting to work.
Else, if as an employer, if I find myself constantly being held hostage by my worker's demands, I may as well just close down my business.
I will argue that it's all part and parcel of the considerations one makes when accepting a job. For example, companies situation in silicon valley tend to pay more to offset the higher costs of living. If someone is working remotely from say, Arizona or Texas, where the costs of living is much lower, it stands to reason that they don't need to be paid as much, right?
Were they able to make it work, or were they just coping?
It's like how, if I stopped exercising. My fitness level is not going to dip immediately. I will still be able to run the same marathons as I did before, and it's only after I stop training for an extended period of time will I start to see the impact to my overall fitness.
I feel it's the same thing here. Apple (and maybe some other companies) have been able to still operate as normal despite the drawbacks and limitations of WFH because of the foundation set in prior to the pandemic, but it doesn't mean this is sustainable in the long run. I think we are both seeing the same picture and arriving at differing conclusions. You see Apple making tons of money and thinking "they did this while working from home, they can continue to do so while working from home" while I think "Apple managed all this despite working from home, time to get everyone back before the situation really starts to deteriorate beyond saving".
If Apple were to continue its existing WFH policies, I believe that's when the real cracks will start to appear.
Your opinion is your opinion. companies that are smart solicit employee opinions and have an impartial observer collate the results and where the feedback makes sense and provides a benefit to the company and employee, the company would implement said recommendations.
No matter what your opinion though, apple employees started work with a hybrid work schedule. I’m guess there are exceptions (there always are), but those who don’t want to go into the office and don’t have an exemption, might be looking for work.
I would have thought employees could contribute to being environmentally friendly by taking public transportation or riding bicycles.
Public Transit around the entire Bay Area with the exception of San Francisco is a pipe dream. Its all disjointed and big parts like BART and CalTrain are nowhere near Apple Campus. If you got off Caltrain you could bus to Apple campus but look below.
Yes, that is 100% real. 47 minutes for 6 miles. I used to do that trip daily to a nearby community college I worked at.
I went to a local VTA (Valley Transportation Agency) public meeting once and pitched an idea to turn a small section of the old Vallco Mall site into a small transit center like that at Eastridge to accommodate the new Apple campus and mixed retail/residential housing planned for the site. Glad to see it went nowhere.
Apple has its tech busses that it ferries people in from as far away as Los Banos, thats 85 miles away. That's kinda like carpooling I guess.
As for biking? I suppose if you live in Cupertino or Santa Clara you could do that. Its scary as hell to bike around here though. I have an electric scooter I take to work every once in a while and every time I do, its a matter of whether or not I'm going to make it work alive or not.
Pinning pollution on Apple was hyperbolic on the original post I quoted, imo. The company (apple) still needs to function the way it thinks it should function. I don’t have any sympathy for long commutation times. Pre-pandemic I used to take 1.5 hours to travel 18 miles some days. Now thankfully company has a hybrid policy.